Business online has changed from five years ago.  Website visits used to be the only way to measure online interaction with your brand.  Today, we have social networks, externally-hosted blogs and other interactions with our brands that occur away from our carefully-crafted websites. So is measuring website visits enough?

Here’s the situation. I recently met with one of our newest clients whose website traffic was roughly flat over the past year.  This client has a very active blog that’s hosted externally — that is, the blog isn’t part of their website and visits to the blog aren’t included in their website traffic numbers.  They also have a thriving Facebook page.

Their “prospects” visit their website.  We can make the assumption that their “customers” visit their blog more often than their website.  A third group, Facebook fans, probably aren’t visiting our client’s website nearly as much since they’ve created an active community on their Facebook page.

“Customers” are interacting with our client in different places online.  In fact, the blog and the Facebook page may be cannibalizing some of their website traffic.

“Website traffic” as we know it is no longer encompasses all interactions with their brand online.

Rather than just measuring website visits, I suggest you measure cumulative traffic, including website traffic, visits to your company’s Facebook page, your YouTube channel, views of articles via RSS, visits to a blog on a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com) or third-party service like WordPress.com, and perhaps visits to any niche social network your company participates in — as long as you can track visits or views.

The point here is that meaningful interactions can also happen away from your website.  What part of online interaction could your company measure better?

photo credit: webtreats

Who needs a large sales force when your company website can do the hard work for you? Both B2B and B2C companies are realizing the need to make their websites more effective and optimize them to generate qualified leads.

So where can you start your optimization efforts? These seven universal optimization techniques will vault your online lead generation efforts into overdrive.

Reduce distractions, reduce clutter

People really do care what your website looks like, especially if they can’t find what they’re looking for.   Making your website easier to use starts with removing distractions and unnecessary visual elements.  Identify over-designed elements on key pages and eliminate or redesign them.  If you want more leads from your website, think about ways to simplify and cut the clutter so people can actually find (and easily read) the information they seek.

Include a call to action on every page

Individual web pages should have a singular purpose. The copy, graphics, and page elements should reinforce that purpose, and including a prominent call to action will help entice people to take the next step.  In case you’re wondering, linking to a contact page with the words “click here” isn’t enough.  Don’t assume that your sales prospects will know how your product or service will benefit them — specifically state in a customer-focused way how they will benefit from your product or service.

Improve website navigation

Too many websites have “content silos,” or sections of a website that can only be navigated by using primary website navigation.  If you don’t interlink content on your website, you’re missing out on an opportunity. Not only will linking to other content on your site improve your website’s SEO, it will allow people to navigate your site better and learn more about the benefits of your products and services.  Visitors may also learn about products or services they didn’t even knew you offered, and it will keep them on your website longer, giving you more of an opportunity to convince them to contact your company.

Add a contact form on nearly every page

Rather than making people hunt for a small “Contact” link, add a contact form on nearly every page of your website.  Forms take up more real estate so they are easier to find, and we’ve seen during website testing that people’s eyes are naturally drawn to forms.

Be sure to keep contact forms simple.  The initial contact is not the place to ask detailed questions. Capture only essential information.

Perform usability testing to identify incremental design and content changes

Usability testing is crucial to improving your website.  Testing your website with real people in your target demographic helps find design flaws and weak content.  During usability tests, you’ll often find that participants will ask questions or make comments that can give you ideas to improve your website design and copy.  For extra ideas, test your competitors’ websites as well.

You don’t have to redesign your entire website to make usability improvements. In many cases, changing just a few things at a time can help you fine-tune the effectiveness of a page or page template.

Analyze website usage

I can’t stress the value of website analytics enough. Too many business managers simply look at website traffic and shrug off the rest.  You must realize that actually analyzing your website data can dramatically affect your bottom line.  Don’t know where to begin?  Identify pages with high bounce rates or exit rates and make a list of potential things that could be causing people to leave those pages.

If you don’t have time for a deep dive into your web analytics or don’t have the skills to do it, hire a professional analyst.  True case study: One of our ecommerce clients hired us to diagnose an ecommerce conversion rate problem.  An analysis revealed that few people were adding items to their shopping cart.  We noticed that most of the search engine traffic searched for phrases including “cheap” and “free.”  We set up a segment that excluded those searches, and the rate at which people added items to their shopping cart was almost 3 times higher!  With just web analytics, we found that they had optimized their website for the keywords that attracted the wrong kind of shopper.

Put your phone number on every page of your website

This almost goes without saying, but placing your phone number on every page of your website prevents prospects from having to hunt for it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that everyone prefers email.  70 percent of one client’s sales leads come in by phone!

It’s also important to track phone calls originating from your website.  Installing phone call analytics on your company website does more than just let you know how many people are calling from your website.  It also can tell you how many calls were not answered or went to voice mail, what time of day or what days of the week most of your sales calls occur, what zip codes calls originate from, which online advertisements are the most effective and much more.

Do you want to find out how real customers use your website?  Do you need a deep analysis of your website usage to diagnose website issues?  Do you want to start tracking phone calls originating from your website?  Perhaps your company website may need a website redesign.  We can help — contact us here.

If your company uses its web site as a marketing tool or sales tool, you can’t afford not to test new things. One powerful technique to help your company make huge site improvements with a relatively small effort is the incremental redesign.

Incremental redesign doesn’t involve a total overhaul of your web site — rather, just a single page or page template. It can involve your homepage, a landing page for a paid search campaign, your e-commerce product page or even your e-mail marketing campaign.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say your company runs an e-commerce web site, and you think you could improve your conversion rate. Use Excel to create a simple spreadsheet and log some “control” information — the date range and conversion rate. Pick one page — in this case, a product page. The objective for this page is to convince the customer to add the product to their shopping cart, so you hypothesize that the add to cart button isn’t large and colorful enough. Make a simple change to your product page template by making the add to cart button larger and more colorful. Next, log the test date range in your spreadsheet, what change you made to the template, and the conversion rate for the date range. Having this spreadsheet allows you to compare the before and after, and make a decision as to whether you’ll keep the new add to cart button. Keep this spreadsheet up-to-date over time and it will also serve as a log of what you’ve done in the past and what results you measured from those changes.

Of course, it may take many tests before you find the right page design, but this low-cost technique can be used on almost any page of your web site or even on a landing page.

It works. Last year, an online retailer hired me to improve their conversion rate. After looking at their site, I deduced that the single biggest barrier to conversion was their product page template. A large product image took up the entire width of the page, the pricing/value proposition wasn’t clear and users had to scroll before seeing any product information. With the old page template in place, the site conversion rate was 0.91%. After the product page was redesigned, site conversion increased to 2.76%, all because we changed a single page on their site!

Often, significant improvements can be made without redesigning your entire web site. I encourage small businesses to try the cost-effective technique of incremental redesigns to improve the effectiveness of their web sites.

There are so many features in Google Analytics that make it the best free web analytics package out there, and I want to take a minute to highlight one of my favorites — the often overlooked e-mail feature.

On any page of your Google Analytics reports, you’ll find a small “Email” button at the top of the report. Clicking this button allows you to e-mail the report to your inbox, or even schedule automatic delivery of the report.

Note that the e-mail feature is contextual. If you want to receive the dashboard via e-mail, just click the “Email” button on the dashboard page. If you want Google Analytics to e-mail the traffic sources report to you, click the “Email” button on that page, and so on.

I routinely use this feature to send weekly dashboard reports to my clients. While dashboards don’t take the place of in-depth analysis, the weekly e-mail helps clients identify trends or potential problems.

I wanted to post a follow-up to yesterday’s post regarding shopping cart abandonment rate to provide a real-life example of why shopping cart abandonment matters.

I have a new client‚Äîwe’ll call them “Client A”‚Äîthat recently asked me to improve their conversion rate. There was one problem, though. Client A didn’t have a web analytics package in place to accurately measure their conversion rate. After installing Google Analytics on Client A’s site and configuring a checkout funnel, we found that their cart abandonment rate was a whopping 87% (industry average is about 60%). This is one case where higher-than-average isn’t better.

“Client B”, a long-time client, has a much better cart abandonment rate. We’ve worked for years to improve checkout and get it running as efficiently as possible. After all, Client B doesn’t get as much traffic as Client A, so stellar conversion is a must if they want to make money. Client B’s cart abandonment rate is currently 19%, so their site is getting 80% of their users that reach the shopping cart past the cart and into checkout.

Client A only sent 1 of 10 people through their shopping cart into checkout while Client B was sending 8 of 10 people through.

Knowing this, I can now turn my attention to solving Client A’s cart abandonment problem. We’ll try different page designs and process flows until we achieve Client A’s goal of getting 4 of 10 customers through to checkout, and this will have a huge impact on revenue.

This, in my opinion, is why monitoring cart abandonment is so valuable. Not only will your site generate more revenue per visitor as your shopping cart abandonment rate decreases, but your ad spend also becomes more effective.

I had the opportunity to listen to a Clicktracks webinar yesterday that discussed using Clicktracks to quantify your search engine optimization efforts. It was a rather enlightening presentation.

The presenter argued that “average time on site” is a good measurement of your search engine optimization efforts. It goes to figure that if your web page shows up in a search for a particular topic and the searcher spends a good amount of time on your site after clicking your result, your SEO efforts for that term have been successful.

You can improve your web site’s optimization and usability by writing content that is focused, helpful and on-topic. If you’re paying for search engine ads, write well-targeted ads, click the user to a relevant landing page and they’ll engage with your site.

So what’s a good “average time on site” benchmark? The presenter said that it’s impossible to come up with one benchmark, and that it’s difficult to compare sites. The best practice is to compare “average time on site” for all of the keywords that generate traffic to your site. The longer the average time on site for a keyword, the better the keyword is at captivating the web user. For those keywords with a low average time on site relative to other keywords, opportunities exist to further optimize pages for those terms.

The seminar presenter also confirmed that businesses should pay for advertising on terms they also optimize for. I’ve always agreed that this is a best practice, and you can read why in my post called “The search engine marketing mix: paid search versus SEO.”

During the presentation, one astute attendee asked the presenter why they would use Clicktracks when Google Analytics was free. The presenter explained that Google Analytics uses Javascript to capture information while Clicktracks Pro Server Edition uses the server’s raw logfiles, and this type of data can only be retrieved through logfiles. I later confirmed this through a Google Analytics message board.

Full disclosure: I used Clicktracks Hosted for approximately 6 months until Google Analytics was released. I endorse Clicktracks as the best paid web analytics service but I personally use Google Analytics for my business purposes.

Big news concerning Google Analytics today. Google has officially opened up instant access to Google Analytics to everyone. Before today, you had to sign up for an invitation and wait for access.

Why is this so important? If you’ve got a small business web site, there’s simply no better web analytics package than Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s very powerful and it’s a marketer’s dream. With Google Analytics, you can analyze your web site traffic at about any level you want, find out how people are finding your site, track conversion rates / goals and even track paid search and e-commerce data.

If you don’t analyze your web traffic, you should. Give Google Analytics a try today.

A lot of companies use web analytics to track how many people open their emails, how many customers click and how much revenue they generate from e-mail marketing campaigns. But how many companies track creative performance of their e-mails? What in e-mail marketing campaigns do customers click on?

I recently created and sent out an e-mail marketing campaign for an ecommerce client, and we sought to measure this like I do with most of my e-mail marketing service clients. This time, I’ve decided to share the results since it is generally indicative of the kind of customer behavior we normally see.

Below, I’ve broken down the HTML version of the e-mail marketing campaign into common segments to show you how the clicks were distributed:

As you can see, over half of all clicks resulting from this HTML e-mail marketing campaign came from the left navigation containing product category links. I’ve seen this for years.

This may be a stretch, but I would correlate the willingness for customers to click simple left navigation with recent research that indicates that e-mail campaigns with fewer choices get better results. While products and offers contained in e-mail marketing campaigns often litter most retailers’ e-mail creative, the left category navigation remains the most-clicked area of the e-mail campaign.

Food for thought.

Today’s Ecommerce Times has a good article on small businesses called “Can a Small Biz Make it Online?“. It’s certainly worth a read if you operate a small business on the web.

The article stresses that the #1 challenge for small online businesses is getting noticed.

“The biggest struggle young companies face when bringing their business online is getting noticed,” Chris Hall, marketing programs strategist and tactician for Chris Hall Marketing, told the E-Commerce Times.”

Without a good bit of internet marketing knowledge, it is difficult to get noticed online. The best way a small online business can maximize their revenue is using email to retain loyal customers while acquiring new customers through press and search engines.

“Limited marketing budgets are to blame for most of the challenges small businesses face when deciding to go online, acknowledged Sonal Gandhi, SMB marketing analyst at JupiterResearch.”

Start-ups don’t often have the funding that a larger company might have, so they have to find marketing partners on a shoestring budget. If you’re a small business owner, consider asking prospective consulting firms to do work for you under a revenue sharing agreement. By sharing incremental revenue, you’ll pay your consultant only if they lift your sales.

Once established, it makes sense to invest in at least a basic analytics package and understand conversion rates, which pages are the most popular, and what products are the best-sellers, Mulpuru said. “Then companies can look to big competitors for where to expand to next, and which customer-friendly features it may make sense to integrate next.”

I can’t even begin to tell you the importance of web analytics to your online business. Not having web analytics is like trying to take your body’s temperature without a thermometer. A good businessperson can spend 5 minutes per day examining their web analytics and get new ideas for growing their business.

As they become immersed in all of the technological research, SMBs must not lose sight of the basics, however.

As engaging as researching technology on the web can be, rely on your marketing consultant to do a lot of the legwork and research for you.

Let me offer up this as a parting thought. Many of the small business owners I work with devote most of their day to the operations of their companies. Getting packages shipped, dealing with the accounting and books and managing employees can take up a lot of time. I advise them to use their morning or evening commute to think about customer service and the way people buy and use what they’re selling. By understanding their customers, they’ll be able to offer better customer service and keep customers loyal.

With landing pages becoming more popular with internet marketers due to a landing page’s ability to effectively convert browsers to buyers, it’s only natural for businesses to compare their results with others. So what is the industry average conversion rate for a landing page?

That’s the question I got recently from a client. The answer is that you’re not likely to find an answer, and here’s why — the term “landing page” has different definitions to different marketers.

Here are some of the different ways a marketer describes a landing page:

• A page a user gets to when clicking on my search engine advertisement
• A page a user gets when clicking on my ad banner
• A page a user gets when they click on a link in my email marketing campaign
• A page a user gets when they click an ad on my homepage
• A hidden page that people get when they click a specific link on my site.
• A hidden page that people get when they click on my link from a web directory or other web site

These are just a few definitions. Additionally, because there is no standard format for a landing page, landing pages can look significantly different. Compound that with the fact that a landing page might be doing something as complex as selling a $3,000 television or as simple as collecting an email address.

If you’re trying to improve your landing page conversion rate, make sure you test different versions of the page so see which has the highest conversion rate. Here are some more landing page conversion tips:

• Keep the page simple and uncluttered.
• Write compelling copy.
• Use color to highlight the most important area (the desired action).
• For lead generation, make the form as short as possible and make it the focal point.
• If selling a product, include a large product photo and clearly state the offer.
• Assign tracking codes to each individual version and track sales/leads from each.
• Make sure the landing page has only one subject/focus/product.
• Consider not including your site navigation on the landing page and reduce the number of links off of the page.

After attending a recent business blogging seminar, I realized that most business managers really want to build a business case for blogging. After all, blogging takes time away from other business activities and requires a good amount of effort, so wouldn’t it be helpful to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a business blog?

When I’ve pitched business blogs in the past, the client nearly always asked what the benefits of a blog were. The reasons to maintain a business blog include creating a sense of community with your customers, getting feedback from your customers, generating fresh content for your web site, building company credibility and improving search engine visibility, just to name a few. That was always good enough for the client. I’ve never been asked to specify the ROI of a business blog. Eventually, someone will ask, though.

But is there a way to calculate a return on investment of a business blog? I turned to the web, thinking that someone had already answered the question. What I found out is that other attempts to calculate business blog ROI had been somewhat futile.

After some thought, I decided that it would be possible to calculate the monetary value of a business blog by applying ecommerce metrics. Treating your business blog as a sales channel allows you to quantify the monetary return.

Most internet retailers religiously follow many site metrics, including conversion rate (buyers/visitors) and revenue per visit (revenue/site visits). The higher these metrics, the more effective the site is at generating revenue. The same metrics can be applied to a business blog.

I’m making the broad assumption that your business blog follows sound blog effectiveness principles — you have a good web analytics solution in place, you provide links in your blog to products/services on your web site and you provide a way for customers to contact you directly from the blog.

If all of this is true, you can relate revenue back to your blog. Through path analysis, you can find out what pages customers visited. If the path included a look at your blog and later a purchase or a successful completion of a contact form, you can relate the revenue generated to the blog. For a service provider like me, I have the contact form tagged in such a way that I can distinguish blog contacts from regular web site contacts. If a contact becomes a client, the fees get associated to the blog or to the site (or to paid search, offline advertising, other online advertising, etc.).

	actual revenue	% of revenue
Referrals
Face-to-face networking
Offline advertising
Search engines
Contacts from blog

Examining your web analytics will reveal how many visitors read the blog during the given time period, and this number is used to calculate your revenue per visit. The number of purchases or leads resulting from a path through the blog is used to calculate your conversion rate.

What you’ve now got is an apples-to-apples comparison between the blog and the web site. That’s not all, however. There are other benefits of the blog that are a bit less scientific, including search engine visibility. You can calculate the increase in traffic as a result of having the business blog by analyzing the referring sources of your traffic. You can make the assumption that a majority of visitors that find your business blog through search engines might not have otherwise found your site.

For those business managers who need a business case to blog, I hope this helps. I welcome your feedback if you have other ideas.

I’m the kind of person who likes to put up a web design, test it, then make improvements. It’s how I make my living as a web site effectiveness consultant. A relatively new tool in the web site usability industry is the eye-tracking study, which is used to understand what on your web site people look at.

Seth Godin recently released a video segment of an eye-tracking study for Squidoo. The study, performed by Etre, reveals that web site users’ eyes bounce all over the screen very rapidly. You may have seen a heatmap before that shows where web site users are looking, but this is the first eye-tracking study I’ve seen that shows in a video the eye patterns of real users. It’s enlightening and fascinating.

You can see the eye-tracking study on Seth’s blog here. If at first your inclination is to stop looking at the video, I suggest watching for a while. You’ll notice that the video is shown one user at a time, and that a user’s eyes literally jump all over the screen quickly.

We can learn from this video just how important color and design can be. Your web designer may feel that a certain design will be effective, but you can never know for sure until it’s tested.

Mr. Godin suggests that a user’s eyes are scanning the screen for anomalies and focus on those. For that reason, a web page design that is a little “off” might be the best design.

To me, that’s an interesting tenet. I’ve often thought that a design that’s a little “off” might be the best, but I haven’t been compelled to try this in any professional endeavors. Professionally, I’ve leaned more toward designing sites with more whitespace so aid users in finding chunks on content. I’d like to test that practice.

For more on eye-tracking studies, Etre has an informative video that explains the process.

For years, companies have been trying to understand the effectiveness of their offline advertising and which campaigns generate web site traffic. I recently saw a good example of an attempt to track offline advertising efforts.

I was listening to a local AM talk radio station when I heard an ad for a “I got rich, you can too” offer. While I wasn’t terribly interested in getting rich using the ad’s method, I did find it interesting that the ad asked the listener to go to a web site to sign up for a free book. The web site was 4freekit.com.

I heard the same ad a few days later on XM satellite radio, but I noticed that the web site address had changed to 3freekit.com. I typed these in and you can see what I got:

• 2freekit.com
• 3freekit.com
• 4freekit.com
• 5freekit.com
• …and so on.

I then realized that the advertiser used a different web site address to track performance of ads on different radio stations. He assigned 2freekit.com to one station, 3freekit.com to another, and so on. By doing this, he can measure web site traffic and begin to understand effectiveness and profitability for each channel.

You can do the same thing, but you don’t need to use different domain names. If you advertise in the offline media, start a spreadsheet in Excel and list the media outlet and a memorable, unique web site address for each. For instance, you might use http://www.yoursite.com/newspaper for the local newspaper and http://www.yoursite.com/radio for the local radio station. By putting landing pages at these locations on your web site, you can use your web analytics software to see how much traffic each page gets. If your web analytics software is powerful enough, you can even measure conversion rates and revenue/leads generated from each page.

Use this tactic to understand the effectiveness and profitability of your offline media spend.

Recently there was a story on the ABC News web site regarding web analytics. While this story is good for those that have had no exposure to web analytics, the real value of the article to me is that perhaps web analytics is starting to become a more mainstream, accepted practice. From personal experience, many online business owners still don’t use web analytics to make decisions, and many don’t use web analytics at all. In fact, many people still just want to know how many “hits” they get, which when taken alone is worthless data. (If you want a designer’s take on hits, read the more candid Smiley Cat post dealing with hits).

There are now two good free analytics solutions for those wanting to dig deeper and learn more about the many design and marketing intricacies of your web site. There’s Google Analytics, which I’ve spoken at length about, and now there’s a new free service from Clicktracks called Clicktracks Appetizer. While I haven’t installed and used this yet, I have experience with the Clicktracks Analyzer package and was very happy with the data I got from it. Additionally, there’s a new, more specialized package called CrazyEgg that is due out this month.

For the smaller retailer without extra funds to spend on analytics, the advent of Google Analytics is a godsend. Google Analytics allows you to set up analytics for your site for free. Now, even the smallest retailer can afford a powerful statistics package.

It’s a fact that roughly half of all online retailers don’t know what their conversion rates are. Conversion rates are easy enough to calculate (customers/orders), but cart conversion can be a different story. Until now, only retailers with a complex tracking system could measure cart conversion.

Cart conversion is the percentage of customers that complete an order after visiting the shopping cart. It defines how many people start and finish the checkout process.

Cart conversion is important because it measures how effective your checkout process is at getting the sale. Google Analytics gives you a visual representation of your checkout conversion, one step at a time.

Enter the concept of a checkout funnel. A funnel is wide at the top and narrows as you go down, and an online checkout process tends to work the same way. The top of the “funnel” is the shopping cart (there’s some controversy as to whether the cart is part of the checkout process, but we’ll assume it is for this example). Only a subset of the people that hit the shopping cart will proceed to the shipping screen, and only a subset of those people will reach the billing page. At the end of the process is the order confirmation screen, which typically sees an even smaller number of people.

The ultimate goal, of course, is for 100% of your customers to drop through the funnel and purchase, but that doesn’t happen realistically for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. In a perfect world, the funnel would appear like a cylinder.

As long as you’ve added your Google Analytics code snippet in your pages to allow for tracking, you can create a checkout funnel. Google Analytics allows you to set up “goals,” so you’ll want to set up a goal called “Cart conversion” and paste in the URL for each step in your checkout process.

After you’ve set this goal up, you’ll find the report under Content Optimization > Goals & Funnel Process > Defined Funnel Navigation. Once you have received data for the goal you’ve set up, you’ll see the number of visitors that have hit each step and the success rate.

What you do with this information is up to you. Obviously, you want to reduce dropoff from one step to another. I’ve completed many checkout optimization studies, so if you’re interested in how to use this information, drop me an e-mail.

Not long ago, I read an article on steps you can take to convert visitors to buyers on your online retail web site. This 5-point checklist for increasing conversion made a lot of sense to me, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the first item on their list — checkout.

Simplify your web site’s checkout process

One of the top reasons that users abandon their shopping carts is because the checkout process is too long. Other reasons cited in a Global Millennia Marketing Study include requiring too much personal information, poor navigation, poor download times, confusing checkout process, and requiring registration to purchase.

Checkout is a key area of your online retail site because when people decide they want to buy, your site shouldn’t prevent them from doing so. Here are some ways to reduce checkout complexity and make the user experience better:

Don’t make a user log in or register

People don’t use your site every day, so chances are they will not remember their login or password for their site account. Allow people to bypass this step, but let them know that they may be losing advanced capabilities like order tracking or viewing order history. Instead of requiring registration pre-sale, incent them to create an account after the sale.

Keep it simple

Ask for the minimum amount of information it takes for the user to complete the sale. Anything that distracts your user from the task of checking out is taking money out of your pocket.

Additionally, you’ll need to find a balance between the number of screens you’ll need in your checkout flow and breaking the information up into manageable chunks. Hint: don’t make your checkout flow one long screen since this requires scrolling through many pages and reading through cluttered text. Also, seeing one large form may scare a user away — remember, they don’t want to have to fill in a bunch of personal information. Breaking up screens can give the perception that you’re collecting less information.

Finally, now’s not the time to ask a user to fill out a marketing survey. Information that users fill out during checkout should be mission-critical data only. Save the survey for after the sale.

Reduce download times

Make sure your server is equipped to handle the demand that people will put on it, and make sure your pages are “lean and mean.” Reduce graphics as much as possible. Many sites do this effectively by simplifying their navigation at the top of the page and not displaying what a user would see if they were outside of checkout. Pages should load in two seconds or less.

Measure checkout effectiveness

So how can you measure the effectiveness of your checkout flow? The most common measure is called “cart conversion,” or the ratio of the number of people that order and the number of people that begin the checkout process. Theoretically, you would expect 100% cart conversion, but this isn’t the case. High shipping costs and other factors cause cart abandonment in checkout, and you’ll have to find ways to combat these barriers elsewhere.

Higher cart conversion has a direct effect on your bottom line — it’s not hard to monetarily justify investments aimed at improving the checkout process.

Examining your checkout flow and correcting even small issues and usability problems can have a positive impact on your bottom line.

Clickz has word of a new study out this morning from iProspect. The study finds that only 40% of search marketers are being evaluated on actual business goals. Instead of being evaluated on campaign ROI or total sales generated, success of search marketing campaigns tends to be based on total traffic to the web site as a result of the campaign or top search engine ranking.

The study goes on to surmise that search marketing campaigns are evaluated by intermediate results because marketers can’t tie conversions back to a campaign.

Unfortunately, this is the story with so many small-to-medium sized businesses. In one online marketing forum I belong to, many web site owners have given up on paid search marketing due to the inability to tie conversion and sales to paid campaigns.

Even many large corporations don’t have enough focus and resources dedicated to making sure they are tracking sales, conversion and ROI from their campaigns.

If you’re a beginner to paid search or online marketing, it’s imperative that you track sales, conversion and ROI from each marketing campaign. You should be able to track your paid search activities separate from your natural search activities, your banner advertising separate from your email marketing. I usually go a step or two further, evaluating each keyword I bid on in both Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords, for example. After all, I don’t want to spend money on terms that aren’t producing a return on my investment.

Another ecommerce find today is a study by ForeSee Results. The finding is that factors other than price have a significant impact on the buying decisions of online shoppers.

This study examined consumers’ satisfaction with different online retail sites and considered these factors: price, available selection, and overall experience (look and feel, navigation, function, performance and site capabilities).

Netflix.com, Amazon.com, QVC.com, Newegg.com and LLBean.com were highest in customer satisfaction and had a 36% higher conversion rate than retailers with the lowest customer satisfaction.

The study did not find a significant correlation between customer satisfaction and overall sales, but noted that customer satisfaction measures were an indicator of the future success of the online retailer.